I have lenovo laptop. I installed first windows 7 on a 60 GB partition. Also I had an empty 400 GB partition with ntfs formatting. In the remaining disk space I installed Ubuntu 13.04 Gnome edition and a 2 GB swap-partition. After installing Ubuntu I restarted and instead of showing any GRUB menu it directly boots to windows 7. I tried to boot from the live CD and checked that the Ubuntu is already installed. I tried the chroot command to access the installed Ubuntu from the live cd and tried install-grub and update-grub. They worked fine. The update-grub command showed all the three entries for Win 7 and rest two for Ubuntu. But when I restarted nothing showed up and I booted directly to Windows 7.

Please help me to get GRUB menu. I've tried re-installing Ubuntu but it didn't help.

@meteors - before installing Ubuntu (Linux) obviously there is no partition table created before windows was installed ? but if you create now partition table, it would delete all datas ...
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dschinn1001Aug 18 '13 at 12:47

@dschinn1001 before installing everything I first created a new partition table deleting all the previous partitions using Gparted live. I created partition of size mentioned in the post and selected appropriately ext4 and ntfs for the partitions. Then I installed windows and then ubuntu.
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meteorsAug 18 '13 at 14:20

1 Answer
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First, it's generally a good idea to determine your system's current boot mode, as described here. Knowing the boot mode will enable you to make more informed decisions when it comes to both installation and recovery. In particular, it's entirely possible that your problem derives from mismatched boot modes -- you might have installed Windows in EFI mode and Linux in BIOS mode, which can create the type of problem you've described.

That said, a general-purpose solution to your type of problem is to run the Ubuntu Boot Repair tool. There's a good chance that this will work, but if Windows is booting in EFI mode, you should be sure to boot your Linux live CD in EFI mode to run Boot Repair. If Boot Repair fails, post back with the URL that the tool provides. This will give more detailed information about your computer, which is vital for proper diagnosis of the problem.

what is EFI mode and how do I boot my live cd in EFI mode.
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meteorsAug 19 '13 at 4:27

See the "here" link in my original answer. How you boot to EFI mode varies from one computer to another, but it generally involves hitting a function key when powering on the computer to get a boot manager that lets you select the boot medium and boot mode.
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Rod SmithAug 19 '13 at 15:22